User:Jeandjinni

Hi. I'm a wikipedian that started out writing articles about music and other media I'm interested in, but in the process I've become engrossed with Wikipedia policy and using Wikipedia in education. I also bring my students here on various projects where we try to improve the quality of selected articles while learning about the dynamics of the Wikipedia community.

I'm interested in Wikipedia's debates over Notability, particularly as it applies to music, but also as regards social justice, science and academic knowledge. One of my main interests is in articles about notable subjects that might be deleted due to bias in the collective knowledge of the wikipedia community (or the exclusion of knowledge from the margins). This problem can be observed in how policies are sometimes applied to articles about music and mainstream entertainment, to articles about the histories of marginalized groups (women, indigenous North American people, and so on), and to articles about specialized scientific and academic subjects. For instance, I wouldn't propose for deletion an article about an obscure particle physicist or tuba player, as some degree of specialized knowledge in those fields is required before an informed judgment can be made regarding Notability of that person. I think that specialized/marginal knowledge enriches Wikipedia - in creating a more inclusive and comprehensive encyclopedia than has previously existed.

Another issue I try and look out for on Wikipedia is our tendency to prefer mainstream news sources (in judging the reliability of sources or nontriviality of coverage). Too many of these mainstream news sources - as any serious student of critical media studies will tell you - suffer from institutional bias themselves.